Now, take your smelliest socks and hang them a few inches above your nose. Mix in a few vanilla flavored air fresheners and some spilled humus and you should have a good feel for what we are going through.

Next, take all of your own ski gear, and three of your closest friends' gear, get it nice and soggy and then mix it all up and pack it in the back of a Subaru. Then, go to your freezer and drop a bunch of frozen canned food on your hands for 15 minutes. Oh yeah, and turn the lights off for this part. This should roughly simulate the experience of packing and unpacking all the skis from the roof box every morning.

Ok, now, go crash four times, as hard as you can, twice on your face, once on your head, and once on the entire left side of your body. Make sure you fall on ice or your own skis, preferably both, while carrying your life’s savings in camera gear and lenses. Does this sound fun yet?

Throw in five incredible resorts, one pair of birkenstocks, a zillion sour gummy worms, three bagged salads, two sketchy mustaches, one camo fanny pack, one back roller, six creative yoga poses, 18 Russian tourists and some creative use of the words “shimmy,” "imbibe," “nutrients,” “moist,” and “desecrate.” (have you ever shimmied the rig into a parking spot while imbibing some nutrients and wearing all your moist ski gear?)

Rails are hard

To call this an adventure would be an insult, both to real adventures and to this trip. I feel like adventures usually involve more first ascents and less first backflips, more freeze dried rice and less donuts, more sunrise treks and less sunny spread eagles, more epic quotes and less Office references. Yeah, we use headlamps, to read in the hotel at night. We used all wheel drive, to get over the parking lot plow hump. For some reason we do have some skins in the car, but no skis that fit them. We have a jet-boil, to make Cup Noodles in the parking lot. We’ve hiked a little bit, usually because we crashed and we fell farther than our skis. Some people celebrate when they summit Everest, we throw a party every time we make it down the lodge stairs in boots.

For every shot that looks like this:

There are a few of these:

This is not an epic pro mega trip. This is four guys pretending to be good at skiing, driving and shooting. We’ve had a lot of near death experiences but none of them involved hypothermia or avalanches. Instead this trip has been hit and miss: we almost hit some elk, and missed a lot of turns. (pro tip, don’t use cruise control when blasting along Lake Tahoe, it might make the guys in the back start to consider their last wills and testaments.)

I thought this would look steezy.

It didn't

The Powder Alliance has made for an incredible roadtrip. Stay tuned for a full recap of the trip!